dartharva

Just in case someone might mistake this comment to imply there wasn't actually a large-scale CSA-as-a-service business happening on his island - FBI has officially declared the number of minor victims to be over a thousand: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1407001/dl

It was an industrial-scale racket. It is impossible for that kind of number of victims to be just for one person or group's recreation.

They'll bail them out with what money? US is already almost $40T in debt, how do you think the bond market would react if another $2T were abruptly added to it?

The public is not "accepting" if a large number of things that US governments do nevertheless. I don't think that gets even factored in nowadays.

Yes, but bar a few outliers they are not of interest to large publishers and producers.

I very much appreciate the existence of these free models, but in my experience Qwen has too high of a tendency to confidently give the wrong answer as compared to other frontier models.

The video games market currently has a lot more problems going on than just hardware scarcity. Just like how streaming has slopified and gutted Hollywood and cinema production in general [0], subscription-based business models and consumer-hostile delivery have done the same to video games. Gone are the days when studios used to focus on novelty and creativity, now it is all about engagement metrics and RoI slop.

[0] https://youtu.be/g6YvkbqAhAY

>If you really love your traditions, slokas and chanting

Most people don't. Slokas and chanting are just traditions we do begrudgingly to enable the actual social objectives (family bonding, etc) of the rituals; you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually understands them, even if they have it memorized by heart. I'd say automating the recitation would be quite a good sell for most families, it gives a more convenient and reliable option in place of having to invite strangers over (and reinforcing caste roles) just for that.

Automating pundits in family functions would be my first guess. Could be more convenient and reliable than having to invite some stranger just for recitation.

Some LLM-assisted guesstimating tells me that in terms of raw cost of manufacturing and delivery, given an average (non-voracious) rate of consumption, supplying paper books is still several times cheaper than supplying usable E-Ink devices in non-price-rigged markets.

Supplying kids textbooks in India in paperback, for instance, is at least 5-6x cheaper than supplying them the same in an E-Ink reader despite the ginormous (10-12x assuming 6-7 books each year) difference in freight volume.

Open source Windows NT instead

I tried hard but am failing to see how what you say couldn't just be fulfilled by a chat group today (or even back then).

India? LOL, India has internet connectivity of scale the kind most other countries couldn't dream of. Though most of it, sadly, is IPV4 and concentrated in oligopolies (which for now are still "generous" enough to give us 5G for cheap).

>watching their children die from easily curable infections, enduring routine tooth extractions without anesthesia, working six-day weeks around lethal machinery, watching entire neighboring towns slowly starve to death in famines, living in huts that were crawling with insects, subject to the brutal whims of whoever their local thug ruler happened to be with no human rights at all, and often being enslaved by the millions and worked to death in brutal conditions. Those softies just couldn't possibly imagine how truly hard we have it today.

A significant portion of the human populace still lives like this in various degrees today. You are just blind to it because you'd rather live in your delusion for comfort.

I am surprised at all this shock the decision has garnered.

Is it shitty and consumer-hostile? Yes. Was it inevitable looking at the current trajectory of game distribution logistics? Also yes. Forced digitization should have in no way been surprising.

> But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions

The pirate community does wherever it's possible. We had a blast in college playing Halo MCC LAN parties back when it got launched on PC - by design it needed Xbox accounts for everyone but we worked around it with Goldberg's crack and got the classic experience.

I know many (including myself) who would never agree to this "consensus"

Nothing's going to happen. Nothing ever happens.

Popeye's for 3 costs ~$10 in India unless you're trying to make a full-course meal out of it.

Yeah I'll admit that's obnoxious but one could argue that's technically Nintendo of America, not Nintendo of Japan.

Great thing about Nintendo is unlike its competitors, they don't go around chasing new tech and business models. All their focus is concentrated on the playing experience - interfacing, fun value, guilt-free hooks etc. In many ways they are more a classic toymaker than a tech firm. This is the reason why they have such a strong following, their product at least is not run by MBAs chasing every chance at a point increase in margins.

I wish there were more such successful "craftsman shops" out there than soulless "service providers" that today's video game companies are.

Unironically, ever since generative art tech arrived I have been anticipating full automation of in-betweening. I am rather (pleasantly) surprised it hasn't already been done.

Juvenile ad hominem

I wonder how much utility of such special-purpose languages will keep getting diminished as AI coding becomes a staple in programming and software engineering.

It's still mostly bad news? Also I don't see that big of a difference than the default NPR website articles, all they add is a bit of text formatting and an image.

It's a shame that local newspapers are dying, they are exactly the thing our generation needs right now.

This option is what Indians in India largely use, and it is no exaggeration to say it has spelled disaster to the society. Don't believe me? Come to India, and walk through how people live in any random place.

Tolerance is just another word for complacency. I would much rather prefer a brutally progressive system like that of China or Singapore than a society suspended in perpetual lethargy.

All these things presume actual interest and savviness about the topic present in the student beforehand, which is precisely what most students that struggle with studies lack.

Regulatory capture and false AGI hyping, what else? You'd have to be willingly ignoring the writings on the wall if you still haven't identified it yet.

You can straight-up bypass AI mania in schooling altogether by just keeping pen-and-paper as the primary medium, as most Asian countries do. Digitization is a meaningless overcomplication.

Conversations on this topic could be interesting, but this "article" is literally just a word-to-word copy-pasted default-styled AI response to a single prompt.